


All Those Ages Free

by Monstrosibee



Series: Ultramarine and Nickel-Plated [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Autism, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, i cant believe CoP just put that chapter OUT there, ohhhh my god i love them so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 11:39:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18690745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monstrosibee/pseuds/Monstrosibee
Summary: Some days are easy. Some days, when war and plague and loneliness have left their mark, are very, very hard.But some days, there is someone there to help.





	All Those Ages Free

Gleaming gold designs decorated the walls of the apartment building's hallways as Prowl exited the elevator to his floor, and he took a moment to observe them with some irritation through his orange visor before puffing through his vents and gathering the wheeled crate and pulling it along after him. Scavenger had told him that he'd only been doing non-structure necessary decorations during after hours, especially on the designated housing for officials or those employed by the newly ressurected Cybertronian government, but Prowl still found it a little...wasteful. Too much like old world Cybertron, with over-intricate finery encrusted mansions and platinum plated towers for his liking.

His feet clicked softly against the tile as he made his way down the hallway to the door that had the number 418 inscribed tastefully in a plaque of plain titanium screwed into the steel door. A wreathe of long withered lamp lilies hung around the number plaque, and he made a mental note for probably the millionth time to take the now dark bulb shaped mechanoplants off the door sometime that night; the Helexian Day of Renewal festival had been weeks ago, and all the wreathe was doing now was being an eyesore. 

Fingers fumbled at his subspace, then he swiped the key chip attached to his keystring. He swore when it didn't work, then squinted through his visor at the various color coded chips that clicked softly against each other on the thin line of mesh. Being a materials coordinator for the post-war rebuild effort meant that he had access to a lot of places and rooms and offices that he didn't really necessary need or want, and it meant that the still unfamiliar chip that opened his damned apartment, which he used everyday, got frequently mixed up with about a hundred others. Finally deciphering the tiny text that read 418 on one, he nearly smacked it against the entrance pad of the door, just barely managing to balance the two wheeled datapad cart in his other hand.

He knew it had been a Bad Day as soon as he entered the apartment.

Bluestreak had only returned to Cybertron, surprising and nearly killing. Prowl with a stress related spark attack in the middle of his lunch break, about a month ago, but he'd had several Bad Days since then. They were punctuated by several days in between each where the Chronic Rust Reaction he'd been diagnosed with hadn't hurt enough to strangle the words out of his vocalizer, and they spent those days together, making up for the years lost to war and confusion and fear.

But the Bad Days were very bad.

Prowl could now tell it was a Bad Day from the acrid burning stench of the medicated wax that First Aid had prescribed to Bluestreak when he had first made the diagnosis; a concoction meant to help sooth the smoldering pain in his joints and on his plating where the rust ate holes in the metal. It wasn't faster than his self-repair could fix, but it was enough to be noticeable in the light pockmarks of his blue paint job, and the stilted way he moved when the pain in his joints was enough to make things stiff. And since the few months before arriving back on Cybertron had been filled with frantic hitchhiking and nights spent sleeping in space ports, Blue's chronic rust was making regret him his self neglect.

Setting the wheeled cart straight up against the wall near the dispensary entrance, Prowl shuffled across the fine steal wool carpet to see if Blue had chosen to curl up on the old beaten couch (one scavenged from the ruins, since an old pre-war relic was more comfortable than the practical furniture the construction team had been churning out at first.) 

His hands clenched on the back of the couch when he found it empty. Only Really Bad Days kept Blue in bed, which was where he probably was now, since his keystring was in a pile on the dispensary table.

Doors hitched down in a worried frown, Prowl tread down the short corridor to their shared room. A soft light shone from the cracked door, but upon entering, he saw that it was the little berthside lamp and not the holo-tv or Blue's cheery optics that cast it. The slithery fine chain blanket hid a big rounded lump, pulled up so that only twin blue doors could poke out the side away from the bed, the glass of the windows rolled down to prevent any accidental cracks or scratches. After a moment of Prowl standing in the doorway, the lump twitched, then a soft groan escaped from somewhere near the side pointed at the wall, and doors flicked like they were trying to swat away an organic pest.

"S'okay, Prowl. I'm awake." The silvery duvet shifted ever so slightly, and the single point of a bright green chevron emerged, underlined by a single fuschia optic. Bluestreak's actual eyes were out for repairs right now, and the medic only had a few pre-colored ones he could spare, so he was wearing a mismatched set until his normal spring green were ready. "C'mon in."

He didn't wait for another invitation - Prowl was at the berth before Blue could sit up, hands fluttering in an unsure offer of help over him. Blue shook his head, parting his doors with a pained vent of hot air in order to settle his back against the cushioning rubber pads at the head of the berth. His paint gleamed bright again, only a few shades darker than Allspark blue, but the pits where rust was eating away at the layers of metal between metal...those stretched shadows across his plating in dark claws of contrast. 

Something clicked in Blue's helm as he checked his chronometer, then grimaced. "Geez, it's later than I wanted to be in bed." Gently, he rubbed his fingers in his optics - one fuchsia, the other a startling shade of orange - and squinted at Prowl, who had perched on the edge of the berth, almost hovering instead of sitting. "How was work? Is the archive still looking good?"

Prowl frowned, holding up a hand, and Blue joined it with his, feeling out the sensitive neurocircuits between plating like only someone with fingers as deft as his - and a knowledge of Prowl as deep as his - could do. 

For a moment, they just exchanged general soft thoughts; mono-chrono was just about concepts, feelings, and lacked any real nuance or grammar. One-handed, Prowl pressed concepts of _happy, soft, loneliness, reunion_  in that order into Bluestreak's hand, and the engineer replied with similar thoughts, fingers almost staccato despite the slight tremble in them. Then he offered his other hand, and they linked a circle with their arms, and Prowl lowered his until both rested the spines of their forearms against the cool mesh blanket.

"So?" Blue's hands still shook as he signed, a side effect of the rust in his joints and pain tapping at his circuits. "You said you would take pictures when you went in to work next. I haven't been to the archives since I got home!"

Flicking a door, the silver-white cruiser gave one of those curious but blank stares, the kind that made Blue squirm as he thought of something to say. It was the visor that did it really, but  when that loose flying piece of space bridge debris had blinded Prowl in the left optic at the beginning of the war, Bluestreak hadn't complained that he'd exchanged the thinner glass of optical lenses for a reinforced visor. Did make him a little harder to read, but he had never been an open book.

"I had my therapy appointment today, Blue, remember? I didn't go to work." Prowl's fingers faltered when he saw the expression on his partner's face, then he quickly continued, his EM field flaring in a warm blanket of _comforting warm okay._  "Don't worry, nothing went wrong! It was a normal session, and Backflash is quite impressed with how I have been coping on the construction site. ** _"_**

The worried look transformed to startled, then Blue glanced away and down at the pointed mountains of his knees softened by the blanket. He left his hands in Prowl's though, and tapped out his reply.

"No, I'm glad it was good!" His hands were shaking harder now. "I just...I wish I could've come with you. Like I used to when we were stationed together. Before the spacebridges closed."

Prowl's spark clenched in his chassis the same way it did when a bot he didn't know yelled his name across the construction site. "Before the spacebridges closed" translated to "before the chronic rust" in Blue speak, and he usually only said it when his condition stopped him from doing something he enjoyed. But Prowl also knew, from the constant apologies for never contacting him after Archon and the guilty looks Blue tried to hide when the rust made it a little harder on both of them, that it wasn't just that.

"You can come next time, I promise. I'll even wake you up if you oversleep."

To his surprise, Blue actually laughed, but the sound was hollow and bitter. "Yeah, and then I'll be in too much pain again, and you'll leave my meds on the berthside table with a glass of energon. And you'll come home and I'll have forgotten even waking up that morning or that you had an appointment again." His doors were hitched upwards with anger, and the crook of his mouth wasn't the usual easy loose smile.

"Blue, I'm not mad that you couldn't come. Chronic rust is extremely painful, and I wouldn't have wanted you to even if you were awake. It could've been terrible for your sensory suite to be walking around like this." 

"But it doesn't matter!" Blue tripped over a circuit on the last word, and had to repeat it. "I can't leave the apartment half the time without feeling like melted slag, and now that's affecting you, too! Remember how last week you stayed in with me during a bad spell instead of going to the open house for the new historian's guild like you wanted to? All we did was sit on the couch and watch reruns of that old true crime doc series that you've seen thirty million times."

He was winding himself up, fingers flying too fast now for Prowl to even parse into words. He let Blue carry on for a few more kliks, then rebooted his vocalizer and said, out loud, "Bluestreak."

Blue froze mid-syllable, fizzing dual colored gaze jumping straight to Prowl's, hidden as it was behind the visor. Taking this as a cue to continue, Prowl slipped his right hand from Blue's left and let it hover next to his partner's cheek until he chose to close the distance himself, heaving a shuddering vent as though the touch was energon to an Empty. 

"Bluestreak, do you remember how you almost carried me off the transport shuttle the day you first got home because my sensory suite had crashed AGAIN, just like it used to before Archon?" His voice was scratchy both from disuse - he usually spoke with Backflash using chronolinguistics as well - and an old injury. Still, he pushed himself to continue, wanting his words to keep Bluestreak's desperate eyes focused on him. "Or how two days ago you helped me through a verbal system shutdown in the middle of the construction site when you came for my lunch break?"

"Of course I would do those things, Prowl." The little scarred corners of his mouth twitched ever farther downward as he slid a shivering hand over the one cupped against his cheek, and a coughing rattle marked his engine rolling into a battle touched purr. "I love you. I don't want to see you hurt."

"And I love you too, Bluey-Bird." The thumb of that right hand stroked the ropy weld beneath Blue's fuchsia loaner eye, plating of the fingers reflecting the soft blue light with which the scar glowed - the spark field was scarred as well as the metal. "Which is why I don't want you to hurt yourself trying to be there for me. It's a give and take, and sometimes you _have_  to take, alright?"

Bluestreak took Prowl's hand from his cheek and pressed his lips into the palm, and Prowl started up his own engine in a purr, the likes of which were the whispery rumble of a pursuit vehicle. "I know...but I just wish I could still be there for you for this."

Scooting off the edge and onto the berth proper, Prowl gently pressed himself against Blue's side, and Blue picked his arm up and tucked it around the smaller mech, though he hissed a bit as his shoulder creaked. Thrumming his engine, Prowl tucked his doors in tight to his spinal struts, then leaned up so he could press his forehead against his partner's, smaller chevron momentarily fitting into Bluestreak's wider tines. "Right now? You are being here for me, just like this."

Blue didn't notice when Prowl fell into recharge, because he was nearly offline himself when it happened.


End file.
